This article is from page 71 of the 2011-05-24 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 71 JPG
CLARE’S Munster championship is over for another year – the fifth time in the last six year’s that they’ve bowed out at the first hurdle. All that’s left is for some Clare players to get a prized Cork geansaí, and for the management to gather in a huddle on field and mull it over for a few minutes before talking to some waiting pressmen. It’s hard to know which is more depressing – the way it ended with the sending off of Graham Kelly; the result itself or sobering statistic that Clare’s only win in Munster in the last decade have been against Waterford. As for the sending off, manager Micheál McDermott missed the incident that led to the Miltown man seeing red and what happened afterwards as well. He tells us so. “I didn’t really see it to be honest and couldn’t comment on it as a result, but it’s disappointing any time you lose a man on a second yellow. The referee makes decisions and we have to live with that,” he says. “I wouldn’t condone anything,” he adds, “but I didn’t see the incident, so I can’t comment. I am very much a man who lives by discipline on the pitch and discipline off the pitch. I can’t comment on the incident when I didn’t see it, so I’m not going to say yes, I or no, whether to condone or not condone it. It’s only going on hearsay, but I didn’t see it.” What everyone saw was the way Clare imploded near the end in the face of the Cork juggernaut at fulltilt. And, no one is more downcast than McDermott.
“I am very disappointed with the collapse in the last 12 minutes because were competitive,” he says. “We said we were going to take the game to Cork in the second half and we did well to get within six points of them. We just collapsed in the final 12 minutes.
“We lacked a lot leadership on the field in that crucial period – we could have got at them and made life a little bit difficult for them, but at times there the power and strength and physicality of Cork at times made it a miss-match in a lot of areas of the field. That’s what we have to try and live with and that’s what we have to try and progress towards.”
As for the positives, there many before the were out-weighed by the negative ones as Cork’s class came to the fore once more in the closing stages.
“When our forwards got the ball inside, I thought we caused them a lot of trouble. Our full-back line was very, vry competitive, because there was good quality ball going in there. There was a lot of times in the game when we actually played well, but it comes back to that we have to learn from our mistakes.
“We made a lot of mistakes. We carried ball into the tackle and gave away the ball cheaply and that’s where a lot of Cork’s scores came from. That’s disappointing, but we’ll look to the qualifiers now and try and learn from our mistakes.”